Finally getting on top of things. I only have one more exam, Applications of Quantum mechanics and Electrons in Solids on Thursday morning, then I’m free, free like a bird! So far I think the exams have gone pretty well, but we’ll see how things stack up in the summer!

The Steven Moffat-penned Doctor Who two-parter was as good as his previous work would suggest i.e. excellent, so I’m really happy with the fact he’s going to be in charge of the show for series 5. Shame that won’t be until the year after next! I do wonder what he has lined up for River Song in future - the fact that she’s a character the Doctor will know in his own personal future suggests we’ll see her again down the line.

I recently picked up Buffy Season 8 #15, and it’s possibly one of the best issues yet! Mecha-Dawn vs. Giant Dawn on the streets of Tokyo; can you really ask for more?

I also picked up (at the same time, oddly enough) Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky, the latter of which has a sequel, Iron Sunrise, that I’ve already read, courtesy of my sister buying it for me as a birthday present. So far I’m really enjoying both of them - the best sci fi doesn’t just have character and plot, it has wonderful ideas around which those plots and characters can wind until you have a rich world that at once is both fantastic and believable.

Snow Crash follows the fantastically named Hiro Protagonist: hacker, sword-fighter, pizza delivery boy, in a wonderfully neo-corporate future where a computer technology called the Metaverse allows you to walk around in a virtual-reality version of the Internet. I can’t quite believe it was written in 1992, as some of the ideas contained within are actually starting to come true in parts. The technological vision in here seems like an inspired extrapolation in the Internet-saturated world of today; from 1992, it’s visionary. This is of course one of the other functions of science fiction - to serve as a technological prophet of things to come.

Singularity Sky is different again - set in a future where a hyper-intelligent AI, the Eschaton, has bootstrapped itself into sentience on the Internet, and then distributed humanity across 3000 light-years of space, sending them back in time one year for each light year out, so the civilisations at the edge are 3000 years older than those in the centre. One of the most brilliant things is that real physical ideas are found in abundance - faster than light travel exists, but it’s also a means of time-travel, as such a thing would also be in the real world. Relativity is a fact, not something ignored as too complex to include.

However time travel is not unrestricted; any attempts to violate causality (the principle that events must occur after whatever causes them) are thwarted by the intervention of the Eschaton, which preserves causality for its own ends. This is just the thin end of the idea-wedge in here! The others include mediations on a post-scarcity society, and further ideas on post-human intelligences. Great stuff.

In a public service announcement, you can hear the whole new Coldplay album here: http://www.myspace.com/387267497 Alas, you have to sign up for that insidious hive, MySpace. I’m not sure what I think right now - it’s certainly growing on me, and some songs on here are instant classics, like Lost, and Violet Hill.

Right now I’m also trying to work out what I’m going to do with my time over the summer. I have a handful of ideas, including giving this site the overhaul it’s needed for a while now, and possibly figuring out some way of skewing a satellite map of London so that it matches the distortion of the Tube map. And possibly a good way of managing music. I’m not sure yet…

I’ll leave you with one of the works of the excellent Team Roomba. Best keep your volume turned down…

TF2 Karaoke: Bohemian Rhapsody from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo

I’m in the library, revising for my electromagnetism exam by reading some of the Feynman lectures on physics. He presents the material in a clear, accessible, and interesting way, and it’s a real joy to read. He also goes off on some great tangents to relate the basic material to more complex unsolved problems in Physics, and it’s really, really interesting. He addresses all the issues you have as an undergraduate - should I have a mental model of what’s going on, is this treatment accurate, and provides tips and tricks for solving various problems.

This got me to thinking in general of how easy it is for your enthusiasm for something to be crushed by the process of actually having to study it - sometimes you read about things the great scientists of the past discovered and you wonder how they could bring themselves to work on anything quite so dull!

Makes me wonder if perhaps we get our knowledge too easy; the things which were the life’s work of some of our greatest minds, taught in a lazy afternoon.

Obliquely, this led me on to thinking about Lost. I’ve just seen the 4th season finale, so it’s on my mind, but I’m going to avoid spoilers here! I realised they’d got their characterisations of the characters completely and utterly wrong!

Jack is the man of faith, and Locke is the man of science! Jack believes so thoroughly in “reason” that he totally ignores the things he can see with his own two eyes - like giant columns of black smoke that can kill people. Locke has the use of his legs restored, and immediately comes to the conclusion that something awfully odd is going on. Locke’s attitude is clearly the more scientific. The writers obviously have no idea what they’re talking about.

This could be just because I’m feeling a tad hostile towards them right now - anyone who’s seen the finale can probably guess why!

On a quick skive from revision, thought I’d make a quick note on what I’m upto.

Mostly, going to the library every day. First exam is at 2pm on Wednesday, which gives me a frighteningly short amount of time left. My morning haze has started to wear off, so I really ought to get down to business!

I really, really dislike revision. It’s not so bad when it’s something that’s reasonably interesting, like Quantum Mechanics or something, but trying to bludgeon my brain into learning Thermodynamics in this kind of heat is frankly just horrific and painful, and I want it to go away and leave me alone.

My exams are:

• Thermodynamics & Statistical Physics
• Quantum Mechanics
• Applications of Quantum Mechanics & Electrons in Solids
• Fourier Methods, Differential Equations, & Statistics of Meausurement
• Mathematical Methods
• Electromagnetism & Optics

I’ve done one past paper each for the first two, and overall I’m fairly confident, although there are some pretty major gaps in my Thermodynamic knowledge (how do you work out entropy change again?!), which I’m desperately trying to plug. I’ve done some revision in the other areas too, so I’m feeling fairly alright with differential equations, and statistics is just a retread of A Level stats anyway, for the most part.

First exam is on the 28th, so things are moving on.

Went camping last weekend, may or may not do a writeup on that at some point, possibly when I run out of ways to continue procrastinating. Should have struck while the iron was hot.

So, my last exam was yesterday and I’m now pretty much home free for the next two weeks until everyone gets kicked out of halls. Then I’m home free at… y’know, home.

All in all I think the exams went not too badly. I’m nigh-on certain I passed everything, and fairly sure that I’ll get a good grade. Is grade the word anymore? Anyways, regardless the procedure seems to be that we get a pass/fail letter along with info about if we got into the second year on the 9th of July, then a letter from the Registry in August that gives the numerical results.

The Maths Analysis exam yesterday actually went a lot better than I thought it would. The past papers were truly terrifying. It’s not an exaggeration that I actually was unable to even begin to answer without looking up the method in my notes. The real exam was actually better than that, thankfully, and George agreed with me. Hopefully everyone won’t find it easy though or it’ll get moderated in the wrong direction! Which would be bad.

The QP, SoM, and V&W exam didn’t suck too much, and there were only a couple of things I drew a complete blank on.

E&M I’m actually already starting to forget what that was like. Oh well.

Last night was also the Piccadilly Court end-of-year dinner, which is really strange because… it doesn’t really feel like I’ve been here that long. I mean, it’s only been maybe about 9 months or something, which is nuts, really, and it’s already the end. This extended social group of people is going to drift apart. It’s… sucky, really. To steal some words, I don’t know half of them half as well as they deserve.

In other news:

I bought myself some webspace, so I’m hosting this blog myself now, which hopefully means I’ll be able to put some interesting things on it that were impossible while it was hosted at wordpress.com.

Buffy Season 8 #4 came out on Thursday, and it’s the conclusion to the “Long Way Home” arc, and there’s some pretty disturbing imagery in there, I thought. Better minds than me are probably reviewing it, but suffice to say I’m glad to see these characters back.

I bought a copy of Crackdown for the 360, and It’s mucho fun, what with the beating up the gang members, shooting the gang members, and running over the gang members. Oh, and doing Neo-jumps from rooftop to rooftop collecting agility orbs, which in turn give your jumping ever-greater magnitude, which makes it easier to collect ever-more orbs. It’s beautiful.

Until next time, goodnight. And good luck.

I posted a while back that the most enjoyable thing about writing down stuff that happens to you is that you record the pointless minutiae of daily life that, with no reason in particular to stick in your mind, you quickly forget. Reading back those details takes you right back to that moment you sat and wrote those thoughts.

This was the end to which I instituted my Little Red Notebook, which I have been dreadfully amiss in consigning my thoughts to. The last entry is May 13th, and the one before that is April 4th.

Anyways, what I wanted to record before it’s inexorably lost to the entropies of my mind is that before my exams I’d go to the lobby of the Blackett lab and revise and end up talking to other first year physicists who normally I wouldn’t talk to at all. I don’t even know their names, but we were in this exam-mess all together all the same. Made me wish that on the whole people were more generally social; the herding instinct is terribly old, and the symptoms of it are plain for all to see.

Human beings instinctively form the in-groups and the out-groups, dividing down lines of common interests or thoughts, of common experience. Once you lose touch with a group it’s hard to find your way back in, and it’s definitely hard to break into a group unless you already know someone on the inside. And there’s the risk of ending up in an awful limbo where you’re not really a part of any group, sitting painfully at the fringes. Of course, you also get their logical opposites, the social spiders, sitting at the centre of a vast web of connections.

It’s kinda depressing in a way that we all end up playing this ridiculous game, no matter how stupid we all realise it is.

I think it’s pretty good, but I’m none too sure about the tag cloud. Input would be lovely.

Earlier today I had an exam, and…. well, it was something. That’s what it was. I’m probably going to write about exams on Friday when the whole thing’s over and I can step back and take stock.

It’s also going to be great because I’m going to have this just massive stack of free time with which I can get a few projects pushed forward. There’s two I’m particularly excited about which I can’t wait to start driving towards fruition. I’ll probably post more about them in due course.

Anyways, I’m going to sleep. It’s like, lateness.